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Oh really ? What makes me "ignorant" and a "troll" ? The fact that I've drawn attention to a situation that you don't want to discuss because you don't like it ?
Baltimore is two-thirds black. Vermont is 0.9% black. Your chances of being a victim of violent crime in Baltimore are much higher than in Vermont. Numbers don't lie. Did you bother to read the Mac Donald articles ?!?
You claim not to be ignorant, yet you go on to make a statement like the above? Anyone who has taken an introductory statistics course at a somewhat respectable college should be able to see the flaws in this statement.
Primarily, correlation does not equal causation. Numbers do not lie, but it's very easy to manipulate them to fit a specious argument. The numbers clearly show that VT has much higher maple syrup production than Baltimore. Perhaps production of maple syrup is the root cause for the lower crime rate in VT.
There are so many social and economic differences between VT and Baltimore that making a claim that a single factor is the primary cause of the difference in crime rates between the two places is absolutely asinine. One of the basic lessons I learned in economics courses is to make sure that economies are reasonably comparable before attempting to analyze which factors explain their differences.
I read your Heather Mac Donald pieces and found them interesting. I'll even accept her arguments defending the actions of police officers and the criminal justice system from criticisms of racism. However, I still found your statements to be vile and devoid of any of the intellectual acumen that you like to trot out in all of your messages.
Ah ... the words "genetically predisposed" were never uttered by me. I didn't suggest a cause for the situation I remarked upon, which is that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes, and commit violent crimes in disproportionate numbers vis-a-vis their percentage representation in the population. That fact situation holds true for almost every major American city. I don't need a statistics course, thanks .... I had plenty of those in preparation for receiving my Ph.D.
Of course you did not suggest a cause because there is no cause. You may have had plenty of statistics courses however you and Heather MacDonald perhaps need to revisit how statistics are used. In case you did not glean this from my response to you, every majority white college town (not a suburb with a large university) in which the college contains a majority white major university has a disproportionately high rate of rape. Especially in comparison to the largest majority black major city nearest to these college towns, the majority black inner city according to MacDonald as being the purveyor of violent crime.
For example, East Lansing (Michigan State University) has a higher rate of rape than Detroit, Athens (University of Georgia) has a rate of rape over twice that of Atlanta, Charlottesville, VA (University of Virginia) over twice the rate of rape of Richmond, Morgantown, WV (West Virginia) three times the rate of rape of Washington D.C. And these are all statistics readily available on city-data which we can all view, not from unverifiable sources or data sets that MacDonald has cherry-picked to try and validate her "research".
Using her logic (and yours) each of these majority black cities has at least one majority white college so therefore it is the presence of a massive BLACK population that actually lowers the rate of rape. Apparently in relatively small majority white college towns, the rate of rape is much higher than in large cities with a majority black population.
I can use statistics to arrive at this conclusion and be completely correct. However, this logic (like the logic used by MacDonald) bounces around various datasets and studies to produce a desired result. MacDonald compares state and federal penal systems' incarceration rates with crime rates derived from local police forces (i.e. New York City). What a crock! Black males have no greater disposition to commit murder more than white male college students have to committing rape. Large majority white campuses surrounded by small towns or cities just produce a statistical basis that make rates of rape look exaggerated. Large majority black inner cities without wealthy low-density suburban areas are a statistical basis to make rates of murder look exaggerated.
For example, both Baltimore and Washington D.C. have two of the top ten largest police forces in the U.S. but are only 21st and 27th in population respectively. The police forces did not shrink as the populations of the cities did. Certainly those police forces would have a greater ability to catch murderers. Is that a bad thing? The top ten largest police forces are all in incorporated cities (save Nassau County, NY and the consolidated city-county Miami-Dade, FL) that have majority "minority" populations in which the white population is disproportionately small and wealthy. I don't think it is a stretch to see why disproportionately more minorities are arrested. I don't recall MacDonald ever mentioning "cold case" violent crimes in majority white jurisdictions in which no arrests were even made. Something tells me me MacDonald isn't looking for that.
But MacDonald does look at the crime rates just within corporate limits of majority black cities. If she was looking at New York City 120 years ago when comparatively few blacks lived there...oops! She couldn't! That is where the racism comes in! When these major cities were a majority white immigrant population there were no reliable crime statistics because they were not being kept as there were no exceedingly large law enforcement agencies in the 19th century. Ironically, NYC's police force became massive under its only black mayor (Dinkins) and in Los Angeles under black mayor Tom Bradley to combat violent crime that previously was not being policed in black neighborhoods. Prior to the 1960s, police forces were protecting white neighborhoods not solving black-on-black crime.
The reason why black violent crime looks so inflated is because the police are now looking for and arresting black criminals. The reason why rape statistics are more inflated in college towns is because the police are now more aggressive in arresting rapists and more importantly, MORE WOMEN ARE REPORTING RAPE rather than fearing their claims being dismissed. Don't think this happened, why don't you ask Ben Roethlisberger's alleged victim as he was patrolling the college town looking for prey and she refused to report the crime for fear of being dismissed (which is exactly what Ben's arresting officer did--blame the victim!)?
So I'm sorry that you did not ascertain the proper usage of statistical methodology in your Ph.D. program. However, when I read the articles you supplied by MacDonald I just see a right-wing ideologue pushing an anti-black, anti-immigration agenda. However, black males are not getting more murderous, white males in college are not developing more rapist tendencies, and believe it or not illegal immigrants have been crossing into the United States since 1848, the year the United States defeated Mexico in war to legitimize the American illegal aliens that crossed into Mexican territory and declared themselves an independent country. (That is a tactic called filibustering and the U.S. has been in violation of this international law numerous times and has had to pay restitution to countries such as Mexico and Colombia as a result. Spain is still waiting on its check for Florida.)
The only difference now is that law enforcement agencies are actively looking for these murderers, rapists, and illegal immigrants. Why are these black murderers now being found in larger numbers since the 1960s in the inner cities? Because the overwhelming majority of victims of black murder suspects are black themselves. Prior to the civil rights movement, local law enforcement could care less about black on black crime. But have you noticed that all of these black majority murder capitals have had black mayors and majority black police forces? So now somebody is actually going after the murderers when they weren't before! You read my earlier post; under MacDonald's logic the three murders that occurred in Hagerstown in 2008 should have all been committed by blacks based on "probability". However, none of them were. Accordingly, MacDonald is an English major and lawyer by trade; two fields that rely little on quantitative expertise but rely almost exclusively on opinion and interpretation. So please feel free to take your racist opinions and MacDonald's cherry-picked statistics (with a side order of false logic) and flush them down the toilet.
And please don't take my characterization of Heather MacDonald as a swipe against lawyers. There are plenty of reputable lawyers that do research. She is not one. I love her bio that was provided. If you are unemployed right now you need to get that bio writer to draft your cover letter. If you had not supplied her bio I might be more impressed. However, according to her own bio she is a "non-practicing lawyer" whose achievements are confined to appointments made by fellow conservatives based on the "strength" of various essays and editiorials she has written (not conducted research) and then published collections of these opinions as books. Thanks for the articles; everything she wrote about is easily refuted and explained by this article on the decline of black drug offender inmates and the increase of white drug offender inmates since the 1990s. Nice to know some sources still do actual primary research.
Your post reminds me of a passage from Shakespeare: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
I never stated, or implied, that every black person in Baltimore is to be hated, feared, and despised. There's not a single expressed thought in my post that would cause a reasonable person to label me a racist, and indeed I am not a racist, and never have been. I peacefully co-existed with blacks during the five years I lived in Baltimore (at least, I always tried to). But if you, in your la-la land, are suggesting, for example, that I or anyone else walking home from work at, say, 11 pm on Baltimore street (as I often did), should ignore or not assess the risk coming from a black man in my vicinity, then you're either deluded or you need to return to remedial kindergarten.
Everyone living in Baltimore, black or white (black especially), is at a higher risk for being a victim of violent crime (a higher risk than most other places in the country), largely due to Baltimore's demographics. It's a risk I was no longer willing to take, and neither was my partner. It only makes the news when the victim is white. To suggest that the risk doesn't exist (a la Rodney King ... why can't we all just get along ?!? love & peace lol), or to demonize someone who states what is almost never stated on this forum, is intellectually dishonest, and laughable.
I'm glad that these stories are posted on this forum. They deserve to be publicized. If it saves even one person from moving to Baltimore, it will have been worth it. Numbers don't lie, even if people (like you) do. Write me back when you tell me your daughter is dating a black man, and that you're happy about it. I'll venture to say that, having been in a relationship with a black man for over 15 years, I've been around a lot more black folk than you. To say that their feelings about this subject are stronger than mine would be an understatement. Quite frankly, you don't know what you're talking about, especially if you refuse to read anything about the subject. Given that, I'm wondering why I'm wasting time writing this. But I did; please don't underwhelm me again.
First of all, in your rush to whip off a comeback filled with hot air, I honestly believe you didn't take time to read between the lines, o high-handed one, and glean the most important fact---I happen to BE black, and have been for all 54 years of my life...so you can therefore subtract the portion of your reply about me having second thoughts about 'my daughter dating a black man'...
I'm happily married to a wonderful black woman, and, while our union has produced no children, you can bet if I had a daughter, I would bring her up without fear and prejudice toward other races, as MY parents raised me...
So there goes your notion that I 'don't know what I'm talking about', because, with all due respect to your longstanding relationship with your partner, you haven't been around THIS black man...and I would still advocate that some of your fear and anguish is unfounded, and that people who don't share said fear and anguish aren't 'living in a la-la land'
So you and your partner got out of Baltimore and headed to Houston...I say again, congratulations and double-cupcakes, but that doesn't mean someone died and anointed you the 'Official Baltimore Fear-Monger' based on YOUR particular set of experiences...it doesn't matter a dead rat on a rope to myself and the folks in Baltimore (black and white) how much you rail on from your Texan Olympus about how bad things are...while I'm not a resident of Baltimore, I have respect for those that are, especially when they go about the business of trying to make their city a better place, and summarily ignore the philosophical jibber-jabber of those who left and continue to put the place down from afar...
In conclusion, since you want to quote Shakespeare, I'll respond with a line from '48 Hours' delivered by the great character actor Frank McRae to Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in a tense scene in a San Francisco police precinct...it's a line I've used before on City Data to underscore opinions of mine, and I quote---'Just because you say something with conviction, it don't mean s**t to me!'
In short, I don't need remedial kindergarten, I too have read Shakespeare, thank you very much, and the possibility that I have underwhelmed you with my replies makes me tremble in my boots (as if)...please don't assume, also, that your being around your partner gives you some magic window into the black psyche, no matter how much you run around like the Robot from Lost In Space shouting 'DANGER! DANGER! Suspicious looking black people approaching force field! Evasive action suggested! Cross street or leave city at once!'
From the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, 2008 Crime in the United States:
There were 16,277 perpetrators of murder and non-negligent homicide in the USA that year. Of that group, 5,943 perpetrators were black. Black perpetrators thus accounted for 36.5% of all murder offenders in the USA that year, even though blacks constitute less than 12% of the population. Thus, blacks committed murder at a rate 3 times that of their representation in the population.
Source:
Expanded Homicide Data Table 3 - Crime in the United States 2008 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_03.html - broken link)
Blacks, in that year (2008), also accounted for 56.7% of all arrests for robbery, 34.2% of all arrests for aggravated assault, and 32.2% of all arrests for rape (their percentage of the overall population: just under 12%).
Source:
Table 43 - Crime in the United States 2008 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_43.html - broken link)
If you look at data for individual cities, particularly for those cities whose black populations exceed 50% of the total city population, the numbers are consistent with the nationwide FBI data, or are higher, i.e., blacks account for more crime as a percentage as compared to the national data.
The statement of my original post remains true, regardless of cause: blacks commit violent crime in numbers disproportionately higher than their representation in the population. If you live in Baltimore, Washington, Gary, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, or a host of other cities, your risk of being a victim of violent crime is higher than if you lived elsewhere, largely due to demographics. You can ignore this substantial, and substantiated, risk, but you do so at your peril. To claim that anyone advancing this risk is a racist, or is perpetuating a stereotype, is disingenuous at best and vacuous otherwise.
If you don't live in Baltimore (no info on whether you've lived there in the past), you can't possibly understand the racial dynamics of the city, and your contributions respecting whether it's reasonable to fear black residents, or black areas, can't possibly be taken seriously.
From the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, 2008 Crime in the United States:
There were 16,277 perpetrators of murder and non-negligent homicide in the USA that year. Of that group, 5,943 perpetrators were black. Black perpetrators thus accounted for 36.5% of all murder offenders in the USA that year, even though blacks constitute less than 12% of the population. Thus, blacks committed murder at a rate 3 times that of their representation in the population.
Source:
Expanded Homicide Data Table 3 - Crime in the United States 2008 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_03.html - broken link)
Blacks, in that year (2008), also accounted for 56.7% of all arrests for robbery, 34.2% of all arrests for aggravated assault, and 32.2% of all arrests for rape (their percentage of the overall population: just under 12%).
Source:
Table 43 - Crime in the United States 2008 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_43.html - broken link)
If you look at data for individual cities, particularly for those cities whose black populations exceed 50% of the total city population, the numbers are consistent with the nationwide FBI data, or are higher, i.e., blacks account for more crime as a percentage as compared to the national data.
The statement of my original post remains true, regardless of cause: blacks commit violent crime in numbers disproportionately higher than their representation in the population. If you live in Baltimore, Washington, Gary, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, or a host of other cities, your risk of being a victim of violent crime is higher than if you lived elsewhere, largely due to demographics. You can ignore this substantial, and substantiated, risk, but you do so at your peril. To claim that anyone advancing this risk is a racist, or is perpetuating a stereotype, is disingenuous at best and vacuous otherwise.
While the statistics support this, the problem is twofold:
1) economic
2) cultural
From an economic standpoint, blacks are overrepresented among the poor in relation to their numbers in the general population. Being poor has more to do with it. It just so happens that the poor people in this case are black.
Unfortunately much of black popular culture glorifies thuggery and gang violence, particularly rap music, which is ubiquitous among young urban blacks. Gang members and thugs are seen as cool. In most other cultures, they are seen as well...losers. Unless this is addressed, there will always be a problem in the black community. Bill Cosby said it right when he addressed the NAACP.
... The reason why black violent crime looks so inflated is because the police are now looking for and arresting black criminals. ...
Ah, this is a prime example of "bipolar of the mouth" syndrome, the cure for which is not lithium but kaopectate. I posed a statement about blacks committing violent crime in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the population. You've chosen to blather about rapes in small college towns, federal penal incarceration rates, sizes of police forces, "cold-case" crimes, crime in New York 120 years ago, black mayors, Ben Roethlisberger, the Mexican-American war, and murders in Hagerstown, among other things. Do you really expect people to take you seriously ?!? Your method of persuasion seems to be the old throw-as-much-crap-against-the-wall-and-some-of-it-will-stick method.
Oh, and that Washington Post article that you cite, which allegedly refutes Heather Mac Donald's articles ?!? It has nothing to do with violent crime statistics and race of the perpetrator at all. Really, dude, you're a joke, and you don't have a Ph.D., apparently, so stop being a poser.
While the statistics support this, the problem is twofold:
1) economic
2) cultural
From an economic standpoint, blacks are overrepresented among the poor in relation to their numbers in the general population. Being poor has more to do with it. It just so happens that the poor people in this case are black.
Unfortunately much of black popular culture glorifies thuggery and gang violence, particularly rap music, which is ubiquitous among young urban blacks. Gang members and thugs are seen as cool. In most other cultures, they are seen as well...losers. Unless this is addressed, there will always be a problem in the black community. Bill Cosby said it right when he addressed the NAACP.
You make much sense, sir. This is a large part of the underlying cause. Young men with pants halfway down their asses, talking about guns and drugs, viewing prison time as a badge of honor, and treating women like chattel, ... one judge I know says these young men are lost forever; there's no hope for them. I'd like to think the judge is wrong, but I don't see any glimmer of hope for these guys.
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Get your money back dude
Okay...A Few Facts And Things To Note
